Dale Pendell

DALE PENDELL has the kind of counterculture bona fides that either kill you or make you eccentric. He was in the Bay Area leading up to the Summer of Love. In 14 years living in and out of the Sierra, he botanized with old miners, hooked up with Gary Snyder, started a poetry journal and published Allen Ginsberg. He did just about every drug with a street value until 1989, when he curbed taking them, the better to be able to write about them.

DALE PENDELL has the kind of counterculture bona fides that either kill you or make you eccentric. He was in the Bay Area leading up to the Summer of Love. In 14 years living in and out of the Sierra, he botanized with old miners, hooked up with Gary Snyder, started a poetry journal and published Allen Ginsberg. He did just about every drug with a street value until 1989, when he curbed taking them, the better to be able to write about them.

The first conversation with Dale Pendell is like an overseas telephone call with a lag on the line. I speak. He listens. He thinks. Then he responds in such perfectly formed sentences that I can almost hear the commas. The stilted speech is surprising. As a writer, Pendell is so fluent that he can make a list of drug side-effects sound interesting, a feat he routinely performed in his two books. Delve deeper into his work and you find poetry, beautiful poetry.

The first conversation with Dale Pendell is like an overseas telephone call with a lag on the line. I speak. He listens. He thinks. Then he responds in such perfectly formed sentences that I can almost hear the commas. The stilted speech is surprising. As a writer, Pendell is so fluent that he can make a list of drug side-effects sound interesting, a feat he routinely performed in his two books. Delve deeper into his work and you find poetry, beautiful poetry.